BIRMINGHAM -- Cellist Craig Hultgren has already had his "15 Minutes of Fame." They occurred -- one at a time -- on May 19 in New York. He will have 15 more on May 29 in Birmingham.

"Fifty people showed up on a cold, rainy day," he said of the recent gig at Jan Hus Presbyterian Church in Manhattan's Upper East Side. "I'm going to turn around and do the same program Wednesday in the intimate confines of Moonlight on the Mountain."Subitled "Occupy Cello -- Upsetting the Musical Status Quo," the program features 15 one-minute-long acoustic cello solos by composers from three continents. Organized by the New York-based Vox Novus, the project is meant to acquaint audiences with what is new in contemporary music. Vox Novus founder Robert Voisey approached Hultgren, an Alabama Symphony cellist, a year ago when ASO was performing at Carnegie Hall."He asked if I would do one of these," Hultgren said. "They do an entire series of '15 Minutes of Fame' every two weeks or so. We sent out a call using his databases and my databases. I had 81 submissions."Of those, Hultgren chose works that ran the gamut from convention to radical, although he admitted to leaning to the latter."I went through a sequence of pieces that had to do more with the rhetorical nature of the titles than the actual musical materials," he said. "I have a narrative of dreams, coming to reality, falling apart, and an apotheosis at the end. I could probably have done more musical materials, but I went for the rhetoric."

One reason for that, he said, is the short amount of time to play each piece, and the pauses between them. Not every piece, however, is exactly 60 seconds long.

"They are very concise," said Hultgren. "The form doesn't allow for much thematic development. I wasn't too strict about timing. Some are a couple of minutes long, but they are all concise."Titles like "One Minute of Infinite Dadaist Futility Condensed into 59.9 Seconds" and "Diffuse Reflection of Glass" are intriguing enough, but the most radical of the 15?

"'A Wickedly Dramatic Shakespearean Serenade and Shout,'" Hultgren said without hesitation. "I have to sing into the sound holes of the instrument. I was looking for radical things, and I got some radical things."

Although the 15 compositions are entirely scored and acoustic, Hultgren won't pass up the opportunity to showcase two other specialties -- improvisation and electronics.

"There will be a couple of new Max software computer works -- interactive electronic pieces that have been created for by Phillip Schluessler and Kari Besharse -- and a rock and roll solo written for me by Brandon Goff," he said. "And one of my own improvisations."